I am 100% embarrassed that this even happened and feeling emotional about it today. I want to share what happened to me with everyone here as a learning experience and hope to prevent this from happening to anyone else.
My husband and I are dive buddies. We each have over 400 logged dives and have been diving for 7 years. We recently this year earned our Intro to Cave Diver certification from one of the best instructors in the Bahamas. We have been practicing our skills in the Cavern at Ginnie Springs for several weeks. Yesterday we went to Ginnie Springs to do our very first Cave dive in the Devils Eye by ourselves, no guide or instructor. Our first dive went well! No issues.
Getting into the water for our second dive, we placed our cylinders (side mounting) into the water on the steps going down to the water with the tank valves ON. With all the people at Ginnie Springs entering and exiting, somehow my right cylinder was kicked off the stairs and landed down on the sandy bottom. A young man in the water was kind enough to fetch it up for me and I continued to hook up for the dive.
We did our safety check and I did breath off of both cylinders prior to the dive and checked the gauges…..I DID NOT check the handles to be sure the cylinder was open all the way and herein is the error. When I took breaths off each cylinder the gauges did not move so I believed all was well.
I was able to breathe off the right regulator from the surface stairs down into the Devils Eye into the cave until 43 feet when I had no air. No indication of any problem at all until it was a problem.
This is the first time in my life that I have been so close to death…seriously panicked and thinking I’m going to die in the cave today. It’s true when you hear people say they want to bolt to the surface in a panic/out of air situation. And it’s true that your life flashes before your eyes. I’m so thankful to be alive today as I did switch to my left regulator after 2 breath cycles on getting no air out of the right cylinder. I did inhale some water into my lungs in this incident and I am still coughing today.
The lesson we learned here is to ALWAYS CHECK to be sure your air is on prior to descending. I made an assumption based on my watching my gauges breathing from each cylinder on the surface and it could have cost me my life. Apparently, when my cylinder rolled off the stair, and upon retrieval of it, the handle rolled off enough to cut off my air supply at depth. It was breathing fine up until 43 feet. And believe me, the element of surprise at 43 feet deep in an overhead environment can be deadly.
This was a true lesson for life for me and my husband. I will be a better cave diver for it. Lesson learned.
Glad it ended up ok, and if it helps at all, it's something many of us have done.
As I read your post, something that I tend to harp on when teaching technical, public safety and Instructor programs (including cave, sidemount and a bunch of other instructor programs) is that I have seen FAR too many accident reports and near miss posts like yours where something easily handled becomes truly a life threatening situation. I have no question that you have done valve drills many times in training. But without the construct of expecting to have to do one, it rocked your world, and as you said "nearly killed you".
This is a comfort issue, more specifically it is a lack of the confidence that you can deal with whatever happens using your skills you learned along the way. The why may be because once you "mastered" a skill in training you moved forward and never developed what we commonly call "muscle memory" but when it comes to specifically a sudden unexpected lack of gas delivery it's most often simply panic.
If you want to fix this so you can handle this with zero panic and not even any drama, you need to learn and be confident that you ALWAYS have at least full minute to sort out the issue even with no gas. In other words, that you can hold your breath a minute after you exhaled.
Go take a freediving course, even if you aren't the image of a young athlete, you don't need to be, you will be an amazingly more safe diver. You will develop the skills and experience of breath holding that gives you the confidence that with a fully redundant system such as sidemount/doubles you will be easily able to hold your breath as you sort the issue if one reg stops giving you gas.
The other thing that will make you a safer diver is take a real equipment repair class, once you understand the equipment you are using better, your decision making and comfort level will greatly increase
I ask my students to learn this, and ask my instructors to teach this, IT WILL save lives.
I grew up on a lake with an older brother trying to drown me almost daily during the summer, on the swim team thru Jr High and first year of HS and been diving since 13. Now, 41 years later, older, fatter and in beat up and put away wet shape with a mostly on smoking habit (life stress and I smoke) can still hold my breath for 2+ minutes. Virtually everyone without some lung condition can learn to comfortably hold breath for a minute.
I promise you, what you went thru regards panic and breathing some water would have not happened had you been more comfortable in the water with holding your breath
